The China house of cards - a 2009 scenario

The current frantic quest for efficiency and profitability is forcing closures, cutbacks, and layoffs at coalmines, steel mills, metal processing, construction, and power generation and distribution networks. Tourism, hospitality, and China's airlines are also in line for major restructuring and job shedding.

China's goal to become the world's biggest shipbuilder will take a back seat as China and the world face an over supply of dry cargo bulk carriers and tankers.

Shattered dreams  and civil unrest

Before Beijing classified data on "mass incidents", (demonstrations) in 2005, they were growing in number, frequency, size, and causations.

Today, demonstrations are increasing against official corruption, land theft, unemployment, pollution, industrial contamination related deaths and illness, environmental degradation, and a rapidly widening wealth gap.

China's failed health system, lack of social security net, a rapidly growing greying population, and gender imbalance are creating a massive social debt. A continued slowdown will shatter the dreams of 2008's growing middle class and hopes and aspirations of the rural and urban poor.

The CCP will respond in the only way that it knows - an iron fist and minimal media coverage.

China's new demonstrators

Police and military response, usually reserved for ethnic minorities, peasant land demonstrators and events such as Tiananmen Square, could be unleashed against demonstrating unemployed Han Chinese. Demonstrator profiles are changing as rising numbers of the new middle class, who have lost their jobs, highly leveraged homes, cars, and stock market investments, blame the government for their woes.

These new networking demonstrators bring organisational and communication skills plus the ability to trigger spontaneous widespread demonstrations, as did the farmers and taxi drivers in 2008. This has the potential to unite both sectors in a common cause and create critical mass for widespread demonstrations and declining confidence in the CCP and seek scapegoats for their shattered dreams.

In China, regime change is by revolution, not elections.

Environmental degradation factor